Social Media Strategies in a Search World

Here at Covario, we’ve already been approached by a few companies asking how we might begin to incorporate Social Media sites like Twitter into our mix. Internally, this has been an interesting discussion since our current expertise is in Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Optimization however the social lines are blurring things and what once was a separate channel is becoming more of an extension to the realm of Search Managers. Many companies have started to realize the importance of establishing a social presence, yet many have not fully adopted a “Social Manager” and the responsibility sometimes falls into the lap of the Search Manager. In many cases, the Search Manager is the one to identify the need to establish a social presence for the company.

As budgets continue to get cut and focus starts to shift over to SEO for “free traffic,” marketers continue to investigate ways to maintain numbers with smaller budgets or, do more with less. Social media is certainly a channel for this but the rules for establishing a social presence differ significantly from the rules of search marketing.

These social media sites are not search engines. I’ve read the arguments that Twitter is the next generation search engine and I’ve even made limited arguments myself for its ability to search discussions and trends in real-time, but there are some fundamental differences between Twitter and search engines that, from a Search Manager’s perspective, can really affect the strategy with using Twitter as a channel for campaigns.

First, rank is irrelevant. Twitter reports its results by chronological order, not by relevance. One could potentially tweet their branded terms repeatedly in an effort to appear whenever someone searched Twitter, but that’s probably the fastest way to get blocked by users. There is no rank and there is no relevance to the search terms therefore tracking results in the social world cannot rely on rank information.

Secondly, the matching logic is much more simplistic than search engines. Using the example of searching for “bicycle” the only results returned are tweets with the exact search term included. There’s no intelligence to look for variations on the word like “bike” or “Schwinn.” Also, forget about SEO. There’s no optimization for showing up because again, your tweet is limited to 140 characters. There are no title tags (that you can control), no H1 tags and no need for keyword density consideration. Even with sites like Facebook which offer more content control, the potential of showing up on a search is still limited to searches on names and simplistic matches. It assumes you already know what (or who) you are looking for. There’s certainly no way to search Facebook for “that person in Chicago that lives off of Lincoln Park West who is friends with John.”

So what’s a Search Marketer to do if they see value in social media and want to incorporate it into their area of customer reach? In my previous post, I mentioned the importance of tracking conversions against natural search terms. As a brief summary, this is immensely valuable for a couple of reasons. First, it gives a true measure of success. Rank changes and traffic is good but quality traffic is better and the only way to track the type of traffic is to measure the conversions that the traffic brought. Secondly, it establishes a consistent unit of measurement that ties against SEM spend as well. Paid and organic traffic can be compared for the same search term, using the same metrics to give an overall understanding of the search success.

This concept can begin to apply to social sites as well. Just like tracking conversion from a natural search, or a paid search, one could begin to track the conversions from a social referral like Twitter or Yelp or even Facebook. Let’s ignore the benefit of using social media for brand monitoring for a second and think about social sites as just another channel for bringing users to your site. That’s pretty much the whole reason for SEM and SEO…bring users to your site and help them find what they are looking for (hopefully resulting in a sale or conversion). Monitoring the same benefit from these social sites is right in line with understanding where the biggest return from the effort or spend exists. It’s another free alternative to help bring in quality leads as long as the calls to action in your tweets or Facebook information is consistent with the same that are being run for SEM and SEO.

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